Contrary to commonsense belief, attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics discourage initiative, innovation and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Osama bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, the productivity of those analysts would have been zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 per cent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of the superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not pan out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks.

My experience of metrics is driving gaming the system – look at enterprise IT sales people. To drive faster return on investment on new products, companies will double or triple the value of sales commision driving sales people to sell the new products. Customer needs aren’t important, just the need to recover the investment spent. If the new product is a failure, then customers may burn their relationship with the company because of the mis-sold and wasted spending.